


in ardua tendit

by violentdarlings



Series: i shine not burn [1]
Category: Outlander (TV), Outlander Series - Diana Gabaldon
Genre: Book and TV blend, Female Dougal Mackenzie, Gen, Pre-Canon, Trans Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-29
Updated: 2017-11-29
Packaged: 2019-02-08 07:02:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12859299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/violentdarlings/pseuds/violentdarlings
Summary: The early adventures of Dougal Mackenzie, as seen by her older brother.





	in ardua tendit

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the motto (according to Wikipedia) of Clan MacCallum: "He has attempted difficult things."

Dougal is eleven, when Colum realises that there is no deterring his sister from her path.

He’s watching her spar in the training yard with a boy who has two years and a foot of height on her. Dougal has been training since she was six, around the time she started to tear her gowns to shreds and shriek at anyone who dare call her Mary. Their mother had been at her wits’ end, until Jacob had allowed Dougal, as she now insisted to be called, to don trousers and shirt, to train with the lads. Colum vividly remembers his father laughing, kissing Anne on the cheek, declaring that with her curiosity sated, _Mary_ would be weary of running with the lads within a week, and would settle down and be a proper little lady like Ellen.

A week had passed, and then another. Months went by and Dougal excelled, was far better at staff and pistol and horse that Colum himself. It had rankled, for years, until he’d fallen from his horse and greater concerns had pressed him, like whether he’d live. Like whether life would ever be all right again.

Like whether a cripple could someday lead the clan.

Dougal is in the training yard, and Colum is watching from above, standing beside his mother and father. His warped legs ache, but all the same he’d rather die than give sign of it.

Dougal is disarmed, swiftly and brutally, and Colum waits for her to surrender. Instead, he (along with his parents and Dougal’s doughty opponent) are taken off guard when she drops her shield and hurtles herself at the boy’s middle. Jacob barks out a brief moment of laughter as the boy and girl tussle in the mud. It is amusing, Colum has to admit.

The fight is short but violent. Dougal seems to be faring well enough until the boy catches hold of her long red hair, pulling it loose from its coils as he tugs it viciously. Dougal, eyes streaming from the pain, swings at him and misses, landing on her face in the dirt. The boy is laughing, and that must be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, because Dougal pushes herself to her feet, mud caked down her face and in her hair, and shrieks: “Ye rutting wee smout, see if ye’re still smirking when I stick my cock up yer arse!”

Colum had not known silence could fall so fast. He chances a glance at his parents and finds his mother white and his father red, rapidly darkening to purple. Colum doubts his little sister even knows the full meaning of what she’s said, has probably heard it slung about the yards as an insult and has decided to parrot it back. All the same, it is unacceptable for the laird’s daughter to speak that way, and Dougal knows it.

And Dougal does not have a cock. Dougal is a girl.

Colum eyes his parents “‘Let her go,’” Anne is muttering rather wildly, “‘will settle _down_ –’”

Jacob’s mouth is set in a thin line. “Mary Mackenzie,” he thunders, and Colum can see confusion on Dougal’s face, how it takes his sister a moment to realise her father means her, “In my study, now.”

 

Colum doesn’t see, but he hears that his father thrashed Dougal with her breeches on and her shirt still sweaty from training. _Only lassies are skelped with their arses not bare_ , he can hear Dougal complaining. Only his sister would insist on being beaten the more painful way.

Colum waits until the castle is asleep, and slips out of his room to his sister’s next door. Unsurprisingly, Dougal’s room is empty. Colum sighs, and limps, slowly and painfully, down to the stables. Sure enough, his sister is there, saddling a horse that is by rights far too large for her. Colum leans against the stable door and asks, mildly, with the diplomacy Ned Gowan has been teaching him, “Where are you off to, then?”

Dougal swings around, her face red, her cheeks blotchy and tear-stained. “Anywhere,” she snarls, tightening a buckle. “Anywhere that’s not here. Inverness, Edinburgh. Hell, I’d go to bloody _England_. I don’t care, just anywhere I don’t have to be a rutting _girl_.”

Colum lets the curse slide. “Counterproductive,” he says wryly. “If you want to impress them, running away is hardly conducive.” Dougal glares at him.

“Thank you, o wise one,” she snaps. Colum sketches a mocking bow.

“I live to serve,” he says. His little sister’s face is so red it’s turning purple. For a moment, Colum is stunned by his sister’s resemblance to their father, for all the hair is different and Dougal’s face is child-small, fine boned like a lass.

“If you’re so clever, what do you suggest I do?” Dougal asks harshly. Colum shrugs.

“Officially, I think you should go back to bed,” he says lightly, and Dougal’s mouth falls open, ready to argue. “Unofficially?” He pauses for a moment, gauging Dougal’s mood; she’s interested again. “Go live wild for a while. Practice your training. Prove you’re as good as a man.”

Dougal’s eyes light up, and Colum takes her moment of vulnerability to quickly embrace her. “Don’t starve to death,” he says. “Or freeze. Or –”

“Get caught poaching, fall in a river, or drink with strange men,” Dougal says, her eyes laughing, her smile infectious. She reaches up, hugs Colum briefly with her strong arms. “Thank you, _Mother_ ,” she teases, and releases him, throws herself up into the saddle.

She’s gone without so much as a goodbye.

 

Colum meant for a week or two. Dougal stays away three months, misses her twelfth birthday and Colum’s thirteenth, and in general causes absolute chaos at Castle Leoch in her absence. Jacob sends out daily search parties, who all come back with nothing. He himself leads a week-long hunt through the Highlands for his third-born, but returns empty handed all the same. Colum starts to fear his sister lost, dead in a ditch or raped in a brothel, or somehow worse, boarded a ship to somewhere far away with no intention to return.

Dougal would have laughed at his fears, and draped a brotherly arm over his shoulder. _Don’t fret, mother hen_ , she’d say. _I wouldn’t leave you all alone in this._

And of course, even the memory of her is right.

They’re at breakfast when the doors to the hall swing open. Colum looks up from his porridge, sees Dougal swaggering towards them, her russet head shorn almost to the scalp and her small face chapped by the wind. Somewhere she’s picked up a Mackenzie tartan and is wearing it defiantly as a kilt, a small sword belt around her hips, although the sword itself has been removed in deference to her laird. She looks savage, and wild, and nothing like his little sister.

Dougal looks like a _man_.

“Mother, Father,” she says, visibly striving for nonchalance, although Colum can hear a quaver of uncertainty in her voice, a slight vulnerability in the tremble of her lower lip. “I’ve come back.”

Colum surveys his parents. His mother is relief and fury incarnate, but Jacob’s face is unreadable. Colum studies it out of the corner of his eye, memorising the ice in his father’s eyes, the wooden coldness of his jaw, for when Colum himself someday is the leader of the clan.

_If_ someday he is the leader of the clan.

“Where have ye been, then?” Jacob asks eventually. Dougal shrugs.

“On the muirs,” she says vaguely, but blithely all the same. Jacob nods slowly.

“And who aided you while you were gone?” Dougal shakes her head.

“Nobody,” she says. “I was alone.” Jacob nods, slowly, and is quiet for a long time, every man and maid in the hall hanging onto to his next word in the silence.

“Sit down and have some breakfast, Dougal,” he says at length. “Ye must be half-starved, lad.” Dougal nods, her small face lighting up like Christmas morning.

“Thank ye, Father,” she says, and takes her usual seat next to Colum. Colum’s mother is weeping silently; Colum supposes that, in an odd way, it’s like her daughter has died, for all Dougal is still there.

“Good morning, brother,” Colum murmurs. Dougal is beautiful, her boy’s hair and strong features for a moment rendering her some alien creature, but for the familiar hazel of her eyes.

“And to you, brother,” she replies.

After that, not even their mother refers to Dougal as Mary anymore, although Colum can tell that it pains her. She has Ellen and Janet and Flora and wee Jocasta to occupy her, but Colum still sees her eyes stray wistfully to tall, strong Dougal, whose hair is starting to grow back slowly, who wears her Mackenzie kilt with pride.

Dougal Mackenzie, Colum considers wryly. It has a nice ring to it.


End file.
